17th September 2011
The very idea of a cruise holiday sends shivers down some spines — and not necessarily shivers of excitement. There’s something about the stereotypical swirly carpets and afternoon dance classes that puts a lot of people off. However, what many readers may not realise is that the cruise industry has come on leaps and bounds: newer, smaller ships, not a swirl in sight, and cruises to suit everyone — whether that’s a music voyage down the Danube with private concerts in palaces and churches along the way, or a wine-tasting trip around the Mediterranean aboard a real sailing ship. Whatever your preconceptions, I challenge you to read this guide and not find an idea that inspires you.

4th June 2011
Even in a time of national austerity, the last thing most people are willing to forego is a holiday. The more stressful life is, the more we need to escape from time to time, whether it’s to a monastery in Bali or a B&B in Bournemouth. For this new-look Spectator travel supplement, our theme is adventure. By that we don’t necessarily mean bungee jumping over Victoria Falls or climbing Kilimanjaro, but the simpler thrill that comes from discovering somewhere new. All travel should embody a spirit of discovery — the fly-and-flop holiday has its time and place, but the sophisticated traveller is always searching for something more.

Inspired by music, the colourful interiors of the Costa Pacifica characterise the lively atmosphere onboard. The Pacifica sails from Dover to Savona in Italy for a nine-night cruise calling at Guernsey, Vigo, Lisbon, Valencia, Barcelona and Monte Carlo. On board there is a Grand Prix Simulator, a spectacular outer deck with glass roof and night cinema, and a theatre with exceptional sound quality. For relaxation, there is the Samsara Spa. From £689 per person.

Britain’s newest cruise line, Cruise & Maritime Voyages, has two small ships, Marco Polo and Ocean Countess that sail from six different British ports. Both ships deal in sterling on board and the ships are geared for British clients seeking a ‘home from home’ style of leisurely cruising but with friendly and attentive service — there is one crew member to every two passengers.

The 800-passenger Marco Polo has built up a strong following with its Mediterranean cruises to Spain, the Balearic Islands, Portugal and Morocco. In 2009 she was voted the best cruise ship on www.cruise.co.uk. Marco Polo operates exclusively for adult passengers from her home port of Tilbury on the Thames, just ten minutes from the M25.

Following a £3 million refurbishment programme, the 800-passenger Ocean Countess (originally the impressive Cunard Countess) joined the fleet in April. She operates year round sailings from six British ports, plus Dublin in Ireland. The ship has a new main restaurant but has retained all the original deck space and sun terraces that were specially built for cruising in the Caribbean. In late September she will sail from Plymouth for the Mediterranean. Prices from £1,398 per person.
Great Rail Journeys

Great Rail Journeys don’t just arrive by rail, but choose the most convenient travelling times and the most comfortable trains, sometimes overnighting at a hotel en route. Passengers usually start their journey at London’s St Pancras International and go on to various British or European destinations. Because they operate with a range of partners, Great Rail Journeys offer a wide choice of cruise and ship, from a luxurious five-star cruiser to a small hotel-barge. A Great Rail Journeys group on board a ship usually consists of between 35 and 45 guests, benefitting from a dedicated tour manager (on the trip as well as the cruise) in addition to the ship’s staff. Some cruises, particularly on the smaller hotel-barges, are exclusive to Great Rail Journeys. A typical journey might last ten days and include a seven-night AMA Waterways ‘Premium Danube Cruise’ with shore excursions and wine at dinner included as well as return first class rail from London.

Prices vary tremendously, depending on the choice of cruise, but can start at £898 per person for a seven-day trip to the Scottish islands and lochs.

As P&O is based in the UK, all seven of its ships sail from and to Southampton with no flights involved. Azura, P&O’s brand new ship, launched by Darcey Bussell, has an Indian restaurant by Michelin-starred chef Atul Kochhar, and a wine bar by Olly Smith. It will offer Central Mediterranean cruises. Prices from £1,654 per person with £50 spending money.

Arcadia is an adults-only ship, featuring a restaurant with Gary Rhodes and an extensive spa with hydrotherapy pool and thermal suite with heated loungers. It will sail to the Canary Islands. From £1,137 per person.

Princess Cruises operates a fleet of 17 modern ships, renowned for their American-style luxury, that cruise to more places than any other cruise line: 330 destinations on all seven continents. They offer a range of innovative features, like Movies under the Stars and the adults only retreat, the Sanctuary. Princess Cruises was recently voted the Best Luxury Cruise Line 2009 at the British Travel Awards.

Onboard Grand Princess there are a variety of restaurants, including Sabatini’s Italian and the Crown Grill Steak House. There is even a wedding chapel.

Autumn cruises on offer include the ‘Mediterranean Medley’ and ‘Iberia’ from Southampton.

Bookings were up nearly a quarter last year so Shearings has launched its biggest ever programme for 2011 and increased its fleet of ships to five with the introduction of two new vessels, the four-star MPS Da Vinci and the four-star MS Seine Princess. Twelve new itineraries bring Shearing’s total number of river cruises to 41.

Azamara offer upscale boutique cruises within the Royal Caribbean Cruise portfolio. Azamara prides itself on offering guests two or three nights in ports such as St Petersburg, Sorrento, Venice and Monte Carlo. Its two ships, Azamara Quest and Azamara Journey, take just 650 passengers each and are able to enter smaller harbours. Every cruise has a ‘destination specialist’ on board to give in-depth information about the ports of call.

In December Quest will sail from Singapore to Hong Kong and in January it sets out for a 14-night Chinese New Year voyage. In the spring it will sail from Dubai to Athens. In April Journey will make a transatlantic voyage and a seven-night cruise of the Adriatic coast.

Selected Fred Olsen cruises feature the ArtsClub, a programme of special interest cruises, hosted by lecturers from university professors to diplomatic service personnel. They may not be household names, but all ArtsClub lecturers have a proven track record in their subjects, as diverse as gardening, watercolour painting, dance, music and even computers for beginners. There is no charge for particpation and passengers are free to dip in and out as they choose.

A typical cruise might be aboard the 804-passenger Black Watch to Greenland and Iceland. On board the 15-night cruise, the ArtsClub offers lectures on all aspects of photography. From £1,649 per person.

In December, Noble Caldeonia is offering its Christmas ‘Power and Glory of the Roman Empire’ cruise, an 11-night voyage aboard MS Island SkyOne, from Malta to the Levant, including the Libyan coast. Nicholas Reed will lecture, as the ship voyages around the Eastern Mediterranean, visiting some of the most important historical sites, including Leptis Magna in Libya. Reed will be on hand to share his knowledge of the sites, dating from the founding of Rome in the eighth century BC to the defeat of the last Roman Emperor at Constantinople in 1453.

Also in December, the 120 passenger MS Clipper Odyssey will sail from the Bali Sea to the South China Sea by way of the Flores Sea, the Makassar Straight, Celebes Sea and Sulu Sea. The 17-night cruise will pass by these remote and beautiful islands and will end in Kuala Lumpur to see in the New Year. From £5,595 per person.

In November the beautifully preserved MS Minerva will depart from Malta for its Roman Africa cruise, on which passengers will learn about the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs and Crusaders who have sailed the route before. Minerva will stop at the elegant walled cities of Rhodes and Valletta, the ancient Greek city of Agrigento in Sicily, the ninth century medina at Sousse and ancient Paphos in Cyprus.

Prominent historian Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe will be on board, enlightening passengers on the history of these Mediterranean countries as well as discussing his numerous excavations and work as president of the Society of Antiquities. Sir Barry has been professor of European archaeology at Oxford University since 1972. Also onboard will be Christopher Bradley, a lecturer specialising in North Africa and the Middle East and the celebrated pianist Ferenc Matrai. From £2,100 per person.

Titan HiTours, renowned for its specialist escorted tours, are now offering cruises on the river Nile in 2011. The 12-day Cairo, Alexandria & Nile Cruise itinerary combines a thorough exploration of these two historic cities with a seven-night cruise between Aswan and Luxor. There is also the shorter eight-day ‘Egypt’s Timeless Riches’ itinerary. From £1,395 per person and £995 per person respectively.

Voyages to Antiquity is a new cruise line, specialising in the history and culture of the Mediterranean. It aims to open a window into the origins and delights of Western civilisation. These expertly planned voyages are not just about history but also about experiencing the flavours and scent of the Mediterranean through its cuisine, wine and beautiful scenery.

The Aegean Odyssey is a premium class ship that is being rebuilt to cruise in the central and southern Mediterranean. Originally a mid-size vessel carrying up to 570 passengers, the new generous suites, junior suites and staterooms, many with balconies, means she now accommodates fewer than 380 guests.

Voyages to Antiquity offers a range of 15-day voyages. In September the ‘Sicily is the Key to Everything’ itinerary between Athens and Rome includes Nauplia, Taormina, Syracuse, Agrigento, Segesta and Selinunte, Palermo, Cefalu, Paestum, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Capri. In October its voyage, centring on Pompei, will leave Rome for Venice via Pompei, Herculaneum, Paestum, Cefalu, Palermo, Segesta and Selinunte, Agrigento, Syracuse, Taormina, Dubrovnik and Split. Another October itinerary, colourfully entitled ‘God Desired to Crown his Work and Thus Created the Kornati Islands’ will leave from Venice for Athens via Rovinj, Losinj, Zadar, Split, Trogir, the Islands of Korcula and Hvar, Dubrovnik, Corfu, Ithaca, Itea, Corinth, Nauplia, Mycenae, Epadaurus and the Corinth Canal. From £2,295 per person.

In January, Voyages of Discovery will leave Buenos Aires and following in the ‘Wake of the Beagle’. This voyage will cruise past the Falkland Islands before rounding the tip of the continent to Patagonia. Guests will experience the kaleidoscope of stunning natural beauty that leads the cruise to Valparaiso and Chile’s capital, Santiago. From £2,599 per person.

In the summer Voyages of Discovery will be sailing from Harwich and back to the White Sea and Archangel, cruising among the islands, inlets and yawning fjords characterising Norway’s coastline. Guests will experience the White Nights of summer solstice as they round the North Cape to follow in the wake of Arctic convoys to Russia and the White Sea.

North Atlantic voyager and natural scientist Peter Mawby will be on board to discuss wildlife that will be found on this trip. Historian Professor Ian Beckett will be guest lecturer on the first world war. From £1,899 per person.

Windstar Cruises operates three sailing yachts known for their unpretentious luxury and their ability to visit hidden harbours and secluded coves. Carrying between 148 and 312 guests, the luxurious ships cruise to nearly 50 countries calling at 100 ports throughout Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas.

This January, Windstar Signature Collection Host Series is offering guests the opportunity to learn gardening secrets from award-winning British garden designer Anthea Guthrie on a seven-night Caribbean voyage onboard Wind Surf, that takes 312 guests and has deluxe, oceanview staterooms, four restaurants, two pools and a spa along with unlimited yoga and pilates classes.

Guthrie will also host an exclusive Windstar shore excursion to the Soufrière Estate Botanical Gardens on the west coast of St Lucia.

The Discover Cruises website is a one stop shop for everything cruise, whether it’s for a family travelling for the first time, a couple looking for adventure, or a solo traveller in need of a relaxing spa break. Offering ultra luxury, deluxe, river and specialist collections, Discover Cruises gives visitors access to the latest on destinations, what’s new on board and a wave of exciting and innovative excursions and activities.

]]>The wash from the cruise ship Crystal Serenity sends spray splashing up to the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc, where F. Scott Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby. That’s the sort of fact that passengers aboard this luxury ship appreciate. Guests on Crystal Serenity have opted to be ‘enriched’, meaning they have eschewed the kind of uncomprehending, mass experience they might get on bigger cruises. They want instead an atmosphere of erudition and culture. They are cruising not just to enjoy, but to learn.

Enrichment is not a matter of sophistication, nationality or class and certainly not one of wealth: one does not need to be rich to be enriched. Indeed the all-inclusive nature of cruising can offer remarkable holiday value. Once the passage fee has been paid, hardly a pound, dinar, rupee or dong needs to be spent. And with many enrichment cruises, the fee pays for onboard lecturers of real quality: people of the calibre of John Julius Norwich, for example, who have the ability to throw open the doors of antiquity.

The day before a ship offering enrichment docks at a site, an onboard specialist lecturer provides guests with a background briefing on the history and significance of the place they are about to visit. Before arriving at Kusadasi in Turkey, for example, an expert on the Roman Empire might describe the history of Ephesus, alerting passengers to the magnificently preserved library — and to the existence of the tunnel running from the library to a brothel. ‘Just popping down to read the latest scrolls, dear,’ was apparently the excuse. A specialist in the travels of St Paul might also illuminate the evangelist’s great struggle to convert the Ephesians.

In addition to these ‘destination experts’, authors and celebrities are invited to speak on anything from cannibalism to graphology; talks on wine and gastronomy by famous chefs are invariably popular. Some ‘enrichment’ programmes are not so predictable, however. On our cruise to Norway, we were softened up for the shore expeditions with a discourse on Norse mythology so graphic that it should have come with an X certificate. Our fellow passengers, a distinctly cosmopolitan group, were united by a high degree of literacy — that, and a taste for adventure, which was tested by expeditions to climb the waterfalls at the foot of the Trollveggen, the highest vertical face in Europe. As one might think, our group was younger and fitter than is often the case on a cruise ship.

Not every cruise lecturer is a success. After a century or more of experiment and passenger evaluation, even the cruise lines don’t always know exactly what makes a speaker ‘enriching’. Obscure academics have been found to succeed brilliantly, while other more celebrated and popular minds fail. It cannot be entirely attributed to mal de mer.

There can be little doubt, however, that the standard of onboard lecturing is getting much better. There are now perhaps 500 guest lecturers on the books of the agencies that supply the luxury cruise lines, experts in subjects as diverse as archaeology and espionage, Byzantium and the Vietnam War. Some are distinguished academics; others are former ambassadors sharing their insights into recent postings. Statesmen — and women — are also being cajoled aboard for cruises organised by university alumni or similar groups. On board Silver Wind, which sails from Istanbul this month, Mikhail Gorbachev and former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice will be among the speakers.

The roster of lecturers signed up for next season’s cruises looks to be the best yet, and you don’t have to be a member of any elite club to join them: virtually all of these educational expeditions are open to booking by anyone with a credit card.

Among the lecturers regularly invited back aboard these cruises is Glenmore Trenear-Harvey, formerly of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, an engaging purveyor of geographically relevant tales. ‘You would be surprised how many destinations have an intriguing spy connection, and not sites of battles,’ he says. Both war and esponiage will be subjects to the fore on this October’s Black Sea cruise by Hapag-Lloyd’s flagship, Europa, consistently the most highly rated ship in the ultra-luxury sector. Trenear-Harvey offers an insider’s tip: if the subject interests you, invite the lecturer to dine with you on board; he or she is bound to be even more forthcoming in person — and less discreet.

For F. Scott Fitzgerald, the sleek ocean liner was an embodiment of the Jazz Age expressed in the distinctive style of Art Deco. It is, perhaps, no accident that Art Deco motifs still pervade the interior designs of ultra-luxury ships. For in the best of them, experience is enriched by an evocation of past riches and history brought to life by the best-qualified lecturers in the world. l

Hate crowds? Haven’t booked your summer holidays yet? Want to feel like you’re getting your money’s worth just this once? If so, let me make a suggestion. Instead of going to the south of France or Puglia this summer, why not try the Caribbean? It may sound perverse, going when the mosquitoes, jellyfish and hurricanes are at their worst, but if you pick the right island, you may find the climate and conditions pretty much the same as they are in high season, with the added bonus of swimming in sea water which, unlike the Mediterranean in August, is relatively sewage-free. Think! The satisfaction of getting a holiday for £2,000 than it should be! The bliss of not bumping into either Michael Winner or a biggie while swimming in the sea! Really, I can’t see why everyone doesn’t do it, although I am very glad they don’t.

Of all the luxury five-star Caribbean resorts out there to rattle around in, the one I would pick, having been there at Easter, would be Carlisle Bay in Antigua, which was opened by Gordon Campbell Gray in 2003, the sister hotel to his One Aldwych in London. Situated on the undeveloped south side of the island on a crescent-shaped bay, this 82-room resort is lucky enough to get cooling breezes all year round and can be flown to directly from Gatwick in less time than it takes to drive to Cornwall on a bank holiday Friday.

In one respect, Carlisle Bay is all that you would expect, with the tropical cocktail on arrival, the air-conditioned gift shop selling high-rise Prada bikinis and British Vogue for £10, the rose-petal-strewn spa… but contrary to what our snotty Notting Hill friends warned us against, there was no retired dentist couple from upstate New York at the next table celebrating their sixth wonderful stay here. And no, the steel band at the Wednesday night all-you-can-eat beach barbeque did not play ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’.

Campbell Gray has a lot of taste, as anyone who has ever been to One Aldwych would know. Each of the simple but luxurious suites is stocked with Gaggia coffee machines, Dean & DeLuca cookies ’n’ cream chocolate bars and Molton Brown products in the massive marble bathrooms. Charles and Camilla, who were there the week before us, would, I’m sure, have appreciated the very decent rosé in the kitchenette fridge and the fluorescent-lit Mary Fox Linton-designed library, which I read in while the kids played Playmobil and looked at YouTube on the two computer screens. Meanwhile the Just Gay Enough cuisine is perfect for everyone. There are two restaurants: one, East, for grown-ups wanting to give the old sparkly kaftan an outing and serving good old pan-Asian dishes like seared tuna tataki and Thai green curry. The other, Indigo, on the beach, serves proper American pancakes, Oscar Mayer-style bacon and maple syrup for breakfast; ‘Kobe’ beefburgers and fries and the old ‘supermodel diet’ staple, grilled mahi-mahi and salad, for lunch. There are nine tennis courts (should you want to play, which we didn’t), a leather-seated screening room which shows three films a day, and then there’s a masseuse at the spa called Cassandra, who I swear gives a better lymphatic drainage than either myself or my babyfather has ever, ever experienced back home. Perhaps the best thing of all for me, being nanny-less, was the fact that we were ten yards from the beach, ten yards from the restaurant, ten yards from the library, which meant the kids, for once in their lives, could pretend they were independent.

Would I recommend it to anybody? Not necessarily. What’s the point, some might think, of going somewhere with the express purpose of not making friends, of not doing any sights (we did venture out once, to see Nelson’s Dockyard, but so shouldn’t have bothered), of not learning a new watersport (you can, we didn’t), and being tucked up in bed well before ten? But, you know, the kids love it, you being on their schedule, not being hauled out of bed every morning to do something constructive, not having to compete for attention with their parents’ drunken friends. And another thing. When one lives the kind of high-octane W14 life that we do, a bit of social/cultural/physical indolence is sometimes a much-needed thing. For the first time in ages I came back from holiday feeling like I’d had a holiday. The only slightly bitter taste is that on our fifth blissful day the manager came up to us on the beach and wondered if it was at all possible for our five-year-old to put his swimming trunks back on. He was very apologetic. Nothing to do with him. One of the other guests had complained, which of course had us wondering exactly who for the rest of our stay. Wouldn’t happen in Puglia.

In this respect only would I think twice in booking Carlisle Bay for our summer hols.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/659021/islands-in-the-sun/feed/01.jpgfeaturedKing of the hillhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33188/king-of-the-hill/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33188/king-of-the-hill/#commentsSat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=33188‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘“Key management”. What’s that all about?’ My wife winced. ‘I suppose it’s about key management,’ she said, and immediately returned to her book. We were… Read more

]]>‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘“Key management”. What’s that all about?’ My wife winced. ‘I suppose it’s about key management,’ she said, and immediately returned to her book.

We were halfway to Rome and I was reading the user manual for the apartment we had taken for the weekend. It ran to 11,652 words and was beginning to do my head in.

Most of it was about keys. Mrs Odile Taliani, who owns and manages the apartment and wrote the manual, has a thing about keys. She also has a thing about capital letters. For example:

‘….AND THEN TURN YOUR KEY ONCE TO DOUBLE LOCK SECURELY. OTHERS WITH KEYS THEN ONLY HAVE TO OPEN BY TURNING THEIR KEYS TWICE INSTEAD OF ONCE.’ And: ‘….it is essential always to shut shutters and windows especially those which give on to balconies/terraces, and TURN THE FRONT DOOR TOP KEY (SEE ABOVE) TWICE IN THE LOCK EVEN WHEN YOU GO OUT OF THE HOUSE EVEN FOR QUICK SHOPPING and especially when you leave, for the absolute safety of your and our things — for which we accept no responsibility for the duration of your stay — and above all for your peace of mind!’

Nor does Mrs Taliani suffer fools gladly: ‘We do NOT run a hotel with a hall porter. We run SELF-catering apartments. It is necessary to look after oneSELF and think for oneSELF.’

I was being tested, I reflected miserably as the gas-guzzling Ryanair 737 prepared to land at Ciampino. And I was going to fail. But I didn’t. I passed, thanks to Bruno, Mrs Taliani’s driver, who picked us up at the airport (E65).

Bruno taught me key management in one easy lesson. Here’s the deal: you stick the key in the lock, turn it once, and, hey presto, the door opens. There is nothing more to worry about; you can throw away the user manual. ‘Wow,’ I said to Bruno. ‘That’s amazing.’ He shrugged and smiled, and said: ‘No problem.’ Then added affectionately: ‘Mrs Taliani!’

The dear woman richly deserves her admiring exclamation mark. So do her apartments (which I found in The Spectator classifieds). In fact, ‘apartments’ hardly does the accommodation justice. Ours was one of four in Villa Habsburg, all Mrs Taliani’s majestic pile on the Coelian Hill. It had two double bedrooms, both en suite, a dressing room, a kitchen and a big sitting room that opened on to a terrace and the scent of jasmine. It was bliss. My wife grabbed the big easy-chair and settled down for a good read. (Why must she read all the time? Why can’t she just stare into space like everybody else?) ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘This is just like Tuscany.’ She hadn’t said that since we were in the Western Cape last year.

A few steps from the terrace, in front of the villa, is a perfect lawn. In one direction you can see the dome of St Peter’s; in another the Baths of Caracalla. Beyond the lawn is a paddock filled with poppies (in May) and beyond that — at the back of the villa — is a steep path lined with palm trees that leads to the entrance to the estate. The path is bordered on one side by the Aurelian wall, built in the third century as a protection against the barbarians. At the gate wild, whimpering, one-eyed cats stare reproachfully at you. A local woman feeds them.

It is ridiculously lovely and, at a special rate of £130 a night, ridiculously good value. (It can be quite a bit more expensive at busy times of the year, however; go to www.valleycastle.com and check details.)

Within a few minutes’ walk of the apartment are a bakers, a supermarket and a shop where you can buy buffalo mozzarella shipped in daily from Campagnia for E1.50 a ball. It’s a perfect place to chill.

The Baths of Caracalla, built in the 3rd century, are just down the road (actually, a fearsomely busy highway), and they are stupendous. I’d not been there before, and I was overwhelmed by their size — the main building was 750ft long by 380ft wide and 125ft high with room for 1,600 bathers at a time — and by the intricate mosaics (bulls, boats, fish, dizzying 3D patterns).

A few minutes’ walk in the opposite direction is the basilica of SS Giovanni e Paulo, built in ad 398, beneath which are Roman ruins (some from the 1st century) with gorgeously pretty pagan and Christian frescoes.

Rome central is a short bus ride away, though you can walk to the Colosseum in ten minutes and to St John Lateran in five. I did not get the hang of the buses, though — sheer laziness — so we did a bit of foot-slogging (and snarling). One epic yomp was to the Quirinale. It took about 45 minutes to get there, and I was in a muck sweat by the time we arrived. On this occasion we had a lunch date with a Jesuit from Indiana — let’s call him Fr Brown — who is the friend of a friend in Washington, and, unusually for a Jesuit, is a conservative.

He took us to a restaurant near the Trevi Fountain and turned out to be an amusing and entertaining companion. We talked about gays, guns and the old Latin Mass. My wife, who is a bit wet, became agitated when Fr Brown suggested, mildly, that if the students at Virginia Tech had been armed there would have been no massacre. ‘Excuse me,’ Mrs Reid said sharply, ‘but you are just using logic to make absurd points. And if you don’t mind my saying so, your arguments are so male.’

There was silence for a moment. The sun went in. The tourists at the Trevi Fountain froze in their trainers. Then we laughed and moved on.

The next day, Sunday, was our last day in Rome. I twice tried to go to Mass at St Peter’s. Both times I was driven back by the queues. It’s no good telling one of the bouncers that you are a left-footer and want to keep the Sabbath just a tiny bit holy. He’ll just shrug politely and indicate that you have to wait your turn behind the tourists.

Later, I popped into St John Lateran for the midday liturgy, but left in disgust. It was a circus — soppy music, soppy smiles, dancing girls, scores of priests concelebrating in the name of global solidarity (what’s wrong with Roman universalism?), Filipino nuns with digital cameras, people swigging from bottles of water and soft drink.

So I went to Rome and didn’t go to Mass on Sunday. Next time I’ll head for San Gregorio dei Muratori (St Gregory of the Builders), in the Via Leccosa, where they say only the unreformed rite (at 9 a.m., 10.30 and 6.30 p.m.) and there are no bouncers or tourists and, of course, no dancing girls. It’s not far from St Peter’s, either, so you can pop into the basilica after lunch and gawp at the Pietà.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33188/king-of-the-hill/feed/0Ibiza undiscoveredhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33187/ibiza-undiscovered/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33187/ibiza-undiscovered/#commentsSat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=33187There’s nothing like a free holiday. Thanks to a banking ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ brother, a girlfriend and I jumped on a plane and headed to his empty finca in the hills… Read more

]]>There’s nothing like a free holiday. Thanks to a banking ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ brother, a girlfriend and I jumped on a plane and headed to his empty finca in the hills of Ibiza. Our mission was to give it a lick of paint in return for a fortnight’s free board. The pool was green and fetid and there was no electricity or running water, but it was hot during the day, cool and mosquito-less at night and we could happily cope with an ancient generator and the odd pee in the garden for two weeks of such sun-soaked serenity.

Call me a hippy (I’m not), but there really is an element of magic about this enchanted isle. Yes, it’s the clubbing epicentre of Europe, but off-season it is a haven of tranquillity and calm. They say the rock of Es Vedra gives off some kind of mystical energy (something to do with Odysseus and an alleged magnetism that makes navigational tools go haywire).

So perhaps it was that, perhaps it wasn’t, but we had a ball. Resolved to capitalise on familial generosity and our good fortune, we packed some books, rented a car and bought a map: the island was ours.

The beauty of Ibiza in May is a distinct lack of ‘Brits on tour’. The clubs aren’t open and the sea is still pretty chilly — quite enough to keep Wayne and Waynetta away. Instead, fellow holidayers were mostly Spanish — much my preferred choice of beach companion. Lying on a beach with not an Adidas-wearing lobster in sight or an English voice within earshot is some kind of heaven.

Our days took on a pretty simple routine. After some minimal household maintenance (the finca’s refurb coming pretty low on our list of priorities), we’d head to our local village of Jesus for a café con leche and pick up a carton of gazpacho and some quiches from the bakery before heading seaward.

Winds that blow onshore can bring swarms of jellyfish so, after a couple of semi-painful stings, we wised up and learned to plan our choice of beach accordingly. If the wind was blowing in from the south, we’d head to one of the beaches up north like Benirras, a popular hippy beach brilliant for snorkelling. In the south we favoured Es Cavallet and had our first foray into nudey sunbathing. Everybody does it and so did we, until the experience of a lingering Italian asking for help applying sun cream to certain parts of his anatomy sent us running for our bikini bottoms.

Fleeing such flagrant lechery, we took refuge in the beach’s restaurant and had amazing spaghetti with clams and sardines. Full of beautiful people and generations of Spanish families, it also boasts a fantastically eccentric grande dame — think black lace gloves and plastic surgery — who bossily told us we had ordered too much and refused to bring us an extra salad to accompany our fish. She was probably right.

We caught a ferry to Formentera — an island three miles off the southern coast of Ibiza — and decided to be retro and rented bicycles, rather than mopeds, to get us around. Formentera is inhabited but tiny, with no airport and few proper roads — in short, paradise. Here the sand is Caribbean-white and the sea completely crystal clear. We submerged ourselves in natural mud baths — better detoxification than any urban spa — and though there are restaurants and bars, we again took a picnic and spent the whole day by ourselves, indulging in the relative solitude.

As good Catholic girls, on Sunday we headed to church in Santa Eulalia and chanced upon what must be the only happy-clappy service on the island. After half an hour listening to a guitar-wielding and bearded English priest, we escaped back to Jesus only to discover a beautiful church and a traditional Mass just coming to an end.

Despite being off-season, parts of the island are still vibrant and buzzing. We had cocktails on huge white-curtained beds at the bar on Cala Jondal, people-watched during an expensive lunch at the Jockey Club, and hit Pacha — the only super-club open all year round — at the weekend for some really terrible music and token dancing.

Still, off-season or not, my advice is to avoid San Antonio, in all its high-rise hideousness. The town’s only redeeming feature may be Café del Mar and a sangria at sunset, but even that has become a bit of a cliché, and taking a bottle of rosé to any of the island’s other proper beaches (the sand at Café del Mar is imported) was our chosen sundowner every evening with unwavering regularity.

Ibiza town itself maintains all the charm San Antonio so lacks. High up behind the old city walls is the magnificent cathedral with views out to sea. After that one token bit of culture, we ambled through the cobbled streets and browsed among shops selling white linen (pretty tablecloths, old-fashioned nighties — I told you I wasn’t a hippy) and leather bags, briefcases and belts to die for. There are hundreds of restaurants to choose from but we hit upon La Oliva for more squid, it having become our staple diet — a la plancha (grilled) or a la romana (fried) and always with punchy aioli — but this time served in its black ink with linguine.

After two weeks, we left with barely a beam painted and the pool still green but with clear heads and healthy bloodstreams. People rush to the famous ‘fantasy’ island either to rent posh villas and emulate the likes of Jade Jagger or to cram themselves into cheap apartments, but definitely to get out of their skulls and dance in day-glo until well past sunrise. But not us. For us it was a place to chill out, to unwind, to swim for hours, to read, to sleep, to chat; a place for restful, almost medicinal, relaxation rather than chemical obliteration. We knew our Ibiza was pretty different to the one ‘Uncovered’, with all its club reps and pill-popping revellers, but ours it was. And really, why have it any other way?

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33187/ibiza-undiscovered/feed/0Vis-à- Vishttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33185/vis-vis/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33185/vis-vis/#commentsSat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=33185A decent beach should not be too decent. An overload of litter is of course disgusting, but a light scattering — a crisp packet here, a Fanta can there —… Read more

]]>A decent beach should not be too decent. An overload of litter is of course disgusting, but a light scattering — a crisp packet here, a Fanta can there — pleasingly negates any pretentious fantasy of being at one with nature.

The Croatian Tourist Board has struck the right balance on the island of Vis, 30 miles south of Split on the Dalmatian coast. The beaches are magnificent: great sweeps of pretty white pebbles that tickle the rocky toes of the hills. The little clumps of corrugated plastics somehow emphasise the beauty of the shores.

Inadvertently, I started a clean-up operation by taking home swabs of tar on my back, legs and swimming trunks. Three weeks on, there is still an oily tattoo under my left foot, I think.

According to travel experts, Vis is the place to go at the moment. Since Croatia emerged as an independent state in 1995, its popularity has boomed and boomed. Too much so, in the opinion of many travellers and locals, who frown at the crowded beaches and staggering stag-weekenders.

Yet Vis remains, by and large, unspoilt and accommodating. Its tourist trade is in just the right phase: enough travel agencies and souvenir shops to keep the snobby purists away, yet not so many that the visitor feels harassed. It is clear that the authorities have invested heavily to transform the island; fortunately, though, their enthusiasm has not yet spread to the locals.

Indeed, there is an endearing incompetence about the place. My friend and I hired a jeep without difficulty, only to be told there was no petrol for sale, so we would have to cope on half a tank. ‘In ten years, there will be no such problem,’ said the man, with a just-you-wait-and-see nod. Very encouraging. As it turned out, we had enough fuel, though we cut the engine at the top of every slope to make sure.

All the brochures insist on the matchless delights of the Blue Cave, on Vis’s small sister island, Bisevo. We tried to go on two wonderfully clear and calm days, but on both occasions were told: ‘There is vind, too much vind.’ Well, at least it looked very pretty in the pictures.

For all this inefficiency — or because of it — Vis retains a powerful appeal. The island was used as a Yugoslav naval base after the second world war and shut off from visitors until 1989. Today it seems to have awoken in a good mood from a long and heavy snooze, dozily careless to the outside world. The largest towns, Komiza on the west coast and Vis on the east, feel like a throwback to the Côte d’Azur in the 1950s.

Yet Vis has its own stories. In 1944 an eccentric British military mission, consisting of Fitzroy Maclean, Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill, arrived on the island to woo Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav partisans. They had been dispatched after Winston Churchill had satisfied himself that the communist partisans would be better at killing Germans than the Chetniks under General Draza Mihailovic, a Serbian and a royalist.

Waugh was obsessed by the fantasy that the secretive Tito was a woman. Somehow, the leader heard that the novelist had been propagating this theory and, upon meeting him, demanded an explanation. ‘Ask Captain Waugh,’ he said to Maclean, ‘why he thinks I am a woman.’ Waugh stuck determinedly to his line. Informed later that Tito had been seen visiting a woman’s room on successive nights, he replied: ‘Well, we always knew she was lesbian.’

Waugh would no doubt have approved of the island’s unshakable Catholicism, which survived decades of state-imposed godlessness. The faith casts a gentle, silent authority across Vis, even if during our trip a surprising number of churches did not appear to be open to tourists.

There were nonetheless plenty of nuns trotting about. With the demise of communism, they seemed to have taken over the role of state police, frightening outsiders with disapproving glances. Last year, on another Croatian island, Krk, a bishop was so appalled by the amount of flesh on display that he persuaded the local authority to ban bikinis. In Vis, you felt, the sisters had matters under control without the arm of the law.

The emphasis on the spiritual occasionally extended to an unworldly indifference towards food. A tuna steak in one restaurant was so disgusting that I administered it to a stray cat, which amazingly survived.

The next night, though, we went a little bit upmarket to the Restaurant Kaliopa in Vis town, where we devoured slices of delicious raw fish and chunks of lobster in the charming gardens of the Garibaldi palace. Even the sight of an elderly Australian couple passionately molesting each other in a nearby hedge could not ruin the experience. I would travel all the way back just to eat there again.

In fact, getting to Vis is not much of an ordeal. One can fly to Split quite cheaply with easyJet. From there, two or three ferries a day will take you to Vis in two and a half hours. If you have to wait in Split, then an inspection of what’s left of Diocletian’s great palace takes up an hour or two.

So, unless you have a strong hatred of beach rubbish, Vis is a terrific place to spend a short holiday. Be sure to pack some baby oil: I am told it helps remove tar.

]]>‘Can anyone name Tony Soprano’s horse?’ says Marc Baron, our tour guide, standing in the aisle of a leaking coach at the start of The Sopranos Bus Tour of New Jersey. The answer of course is Pie-O-My, and because we’re all addicts of the TV series, The Sopranos, we all know the name and shout it out.

The Sopranos are New Jersey gangsters with suburban issues. The show finished its US run a few weeks ago and the adventures of Tony Soprano, an obese but strangely sexy Mafia boss, are now sleeping with the fishes — but the fans take longer to die. The last episode will air in Britain in September and I am on the Bada Bing Bus (the Bada Bing is Tony’s lap-dancing club) with a damp assortment of English, Dutch and Australian coach-potatoes. None of us has seen the last episode yet, but already we’re in mourning for Tony & co. It is raining great pasta pots.

Before we head off to the International House of Pancakes, Joseph Gannasacoli, who played a gay mobster called Vito, appears on the coach. Gannasacoli has written A Meal to Die For, ‘a cookbook novel about a chef who cooks for the mob’. He wrote it to celebrate losing 160 pounds of fat after stomach surgery. ‘Hello, my friends,’ he says, and produces copies of his book. So we pay him $25 dollars for his cookbook novel; he smiles uneasily and leaves. ‘OK,’ says Marc (‘OK’ is his favourite word). ‘We are now going to play the credits for the first episode.’ The credits roll on the bus’s TV and we clap like idiots as we head for New Jersey.

New Jersey looks like a monumental Croydon — all flyovers, dystopian bridges and waste. ‘Jersey is the No. 1 producer of chemicals in America,’ says Marc, ‘and it is also the diner capital of the world. Why are New Yorkers depressed all the time?’ He adds. We shake our heads. ‘Because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.’

We draw up outside a building. We cannot see anything through the rain, but Marc tells us it featured in the credits scene. ‘Normally there is the most amazing view of Manhattan from here,’ says Marc. ‘But not today.’ The next stop is the White Manna diner. Again we can see nothing. ‘Elvis Presley ate here once,’ says Marc. ‘He had a cheeseburger and his guitar was stolen from his car. It is also the place where Tony’s wife Carmela told her son AJ to ‘act like a good Catholic for 25 f***ing minutes. Is that too much to ask?’

‘OK,’ says Marc. ‘No one here knows what happens at the end of The Sopranos, right? So let’s discuss some possible endings. How about — Tony dies?’ A woman at the back screams. Women love Tony Soprano. He is a spaghetti-sucking Mr Rochester, all huge knuckles and ennui. ‘Tony is super hot,’ says Kim from Iowa, who is sitting next to me. ‘You just want to make him love you.’ We go on a Tony-themed reverie, stopped only by Marc saying, ‘OK. How about Tony goes to jail?’ This has a few takers, from Essex and Amsterdam. ‘Maybe…’ they mutter. ‘Or,’ continues Marc, ‘how about he enters Witness Protection like Henry Hill in Goodfellas?’

We argue while Marc entertains us with Sopranos trivia. If you answer correctly, he throws a packet of pasta at you. Why is the gangster ‘Big Pussy’ called ‘Big Pussy’? (Because Tony’s No. 3 was the best cat burglar in Jersey.) What animal did Christopher, Tony’s nephew, kill? (He sat on his girlfriend Adriana’s dog.) ‘OK,’ says Marc. ‘We are coming up to the Muffler Man. Get ready.’

We turn and see a giant fibreglass redneck. Then we see the Pulaski skyway ramp. Next we admire a misty sanitation building called Barrone International Waste Management. Then — oh joy! — Big Pussy’s backyard: a graveyard called the Holy Name Mausoleum. Next are the batting cages ‘AJ and Big Pussy have a talk in’, the driving range where Tony takes his first ever Prozac pill.

As we head to the Pork Store — a meat-market and coffee bar where the Sopranos crew discuss mob business — our bus gets trapped on a water-logged road. To distract us Marc puts on episode 1 and promises us all a refund. ‘Look how skinny Tony was at the beginning of the show,’ he says. ‘Is everyone OK?’ And so we sit, watching the pilot episode of The Sopranos in industrial New Jersey, as the rain rises to the door.

For details of the Sopranos Bus Tour go to www.sceneontv.com/tour.php/sopranos/

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/33184/all-aboard-the-bada-bing-bus/feed/0China Blueshttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/31087/china-blues/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/31087/china-blues/#commentsSat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=31087I think you can rate the success of any trip abroad by how relieved and happy you feel to be home as your plane makes its final approach to land… Read more

]]>I think you can rate the success of any trip abroad by how relieved and happy you feel to be home as your plane makes its final approach to land you back in Britain.

Flying into Heathrow last month I was pretty much off my head with joy. Gazing down as we circled over a rich tapestry of scruffy fields and housing estates stitched together with arterial roads and gravel pits, I felt a rush of affection for the landscape, coupled with a surge of relief to be home. It takes a lot to make a person’s soul sing out at the sight of Hounslow. In my case, it takes spending the best part of three weeks in China.

This is not to say that China isn’t a fascinating place. I spent most of my time on an island off Xiamen, an industrial hotspot at the mouth of the Jiulong (Nine Dragon) River roughly equidistant from Hong Kong and Shanghai. The scene at the end of our garden put me in mind of what the Clyde or Mersey must have been like at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Some days there was such a multitude of boats, from supertankers and oil rigs to junks, ferries and trawlers passing by through the smog that one worried that there might not be enough water to accommodate them all. My favourite sailor was a particularly eccentric local who rowed himself out into the shipping lane on a plastic garden chair lashed to an old wooden door and proceeded to fish for his supper by casting a hook and line into the churning polluted waters. At night my bedroom shook as the hills at the far side of the estuary were dynamited to make way for yet more electronics factories. The city fair throbs with its inhabitants’ urge to work hard and get rich.

But it is important not to fool yourself into thinking that you will have a holiday in China. You won’t. You’ll have an experience. In my case an experience that deposits you back at Heathrow with a phobia of ever again going to a party where jellied sea worms are being served as canapés and an ankle so swollen with infection that you can’t get your shoe on. The low point came when my doctor looked at my leg, by now a lurid confection of bed-bug bites poisoned from scratching and a drunken fall into an open latrine, and wondered out loud if there might be pupae breeding in my wounds.

You’ll also realise that however utopian it might look, actually living in the sort of rural Chinese idyll of bamboo groves and paddy fields conjured up in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is about as comfortable and stimulating an existence for its inhabitants as being a peasant in merrie old mediaeval England. On a road trip into the tea-growing region in the hills further north in Fujian province, I discovered that the lifestyle which looks so picturesque from an air-conditioned car would be a nightmare to do for real. Living in a hut and spending your days tilling cabbages and picking tea on a terrace in the uppermost reaches of a remote valley with a baby strapped to one’s back like a little emperor doesn’t enrich one’s life or one’s pocket.

As a result most peasants are desperate to get to the big smoke. And they don’t much mind what they have to do to get there. One Chinese lady I met told me that the most interesting thing she had discovered on her first trip to England was the view from her Birmingham hotel room of ducks swimming on a canal. ‘I asked around and nobody owned these ducks,’ she said. ‘That was so surprising to me. In China if people see something like that going free they get it and eat it or sell it.’ The analogy doesn’t stop at wild ducks. From what I could discern, most Chinese don’t have problem with laying motorways through villages, littering beauty spots or wiping out rare species so long as it gets them an inch closer to a mobile phone and a satellite telly. One expat I met put this down to extreme short-termism. ‘Taxi drivers here won’t switch on their headlights at night,’ he said. ‘They would prefer to risk a head-on collision and preserve their car battery. Anyone who is confident that China is going to heed the calls of the industrialised global community to slow growth and combat climate change should spend a week here.’

Once people have made their way to Xiamen, the most popular way of passing time for all but the city’s oldest inhabitants (who hang out at geriatric playgrounds gossiping in the open air as they swing their legs and work their arms on ancient-looking iron turnstiles and seesaws) is at internet cafés. According to a friend who works for a local partner of Coca-Cola — using his perfect Mandarin to persuade shopkeepers to remove the plates of raw meat and string bags of live toads from their Coke-sponsored fridges so he can put a few cans in to cool — it is commonplace for people to spend 14-hour stints playing poker and elaborate battle games from the squashy chairs and gloomy darkness of these cafés.

I heard about a growing cult of clandestine lock-ins at internet cafes where surfers try to look at sites that the government hasn’t blocked or censored. Yet, frustratingly, it was impossible to speak to any of my fellow café-users about this as we languished in front of our screens drinking warm fizzy drinks and eating monkey nuts — to my surprise, apart from one delicious dumpling house, the food in China is generally worse than the most bog-standard fare served up by Chinese restaurants in Britain. This lack of communication was not because people feared official reprisals. They might well have, but I never got that far because after failing dismally over the course of two weeks to pronounce the phrase for thank you so that it sounded like thank you rather than train, far, near, vagina, cheap, expensive and a host of other things, I reconciled myself to not being able to communicate with anyone directly.

Yet looking back, for all its discomforts and tribulations, my expedition to China has served an extremely valuable purpose. It has made me appreciate the workaday pleasures of staying put in Blighty. It’s true what they say about going east, going west, but home being best. A couple of months on I still skip to work in London glorying in being able to read road signs and make myself understood to my fellow commuters who, joy of joys, prefer to blow their noses rather than hawk phlegm on to the pavement.

I’ll never ever go back to Xiamen of my own free will. But one of these days I might summon the courage to order a Chinese takeaway and think about an interesting, if deeply unrelaxing, time I had there.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/31087/china-blues/feed/0Coup de théhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/31086/coup-de-thatre/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/31086/coup-de-thatre/#commentsSat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=31086There are two invaluable rules for a special correspondent — Travel Light and Be Prepared …remember that the unexpected always happens. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop Huge potholes scar the road from… Read more

]]>There are two invaluable rules for a special correspondent — Travel Light and Be Prepared …remember that the unexpected always happens.

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

Huge potholes scar the road from the Keda mountains to the Black Sea port of Batumi. My driver cannot see them for the snow, and I can’t feel the bumps because I have been anaesthetised by lunch. I have fallen victim to traditional Georgian hospitality: a meal that ends in toasts drunk from clay horns shaped so that they can’t be put down until they are drained. I raised mine to my driver, to my translator and to the two strangers who led us to our simple restaurant. Each of them raised his or hers to me. I try to do the sum, but the numbers defeat me. Whatever we have had, it’s too much.

As the car lurches down the valley toward the city, I glimpse features I saw more clearly on the way up. The mediaeval King Tamar Bridge, a thin arc of snow hanging impossibly delicately over the river. The frowning exterior of the St Nicoloz church, used first as a barn and then as a cinema under the Soviets, now restored to worship. The steel pipes — big enough to drive a bus through — of the hydroelectric scheme opened by Stalin, Georgia’s most infamous son.

It’s my last freeloading night in the autonomous Georgian republic of Adjara, and I am feeling pleased with myself. The rest of the press pack have been dragged around double-glazing factories, the rail ferry and the port facilities, but I have wangled a trip that has taken me into a back-country that I had thought existed only in Tintin books. I have seen the mountains, the Botanical Gardens and the Roman fort of Gonio-Apsaros. I have collected colourful stories and met delightful people. And soon, after attending a farewell press conference, I shall be flying home.

The others are already assembled when I arrive. At the head of the vast cabinet room table is our host, Aslan Abashidze, who has run Adjara as his family fiefdom for years. His people call him Babu, grandfather. He has flown us here for the weekend so that we can tell the West how wonderful things are under his leadership, and how right he is to resist the new Georgian President’s claims on the province. At the previous two evenings’ gatherings he has delivered monologues on the glories of Adjara under his government; tonight his audience is held silent not by his words, but by his frown.

Babu has a small tape recorder in front of him, and he plays us a crackly conversation he says has just been intercepted. A general in Tbilisi is telling a friend that a train loaded with troops ordered to occupy Adjara will be arriving in Batumi overnight. Babu presses the stop button and announces that he will meet that invasion with force.

The 12 of us say nothing, but exchange looks. Mine says what luck it is that within the hour, we’ll be out of here, but the other faces show excitement. Babu tells us that though the plane he has organised for us is ready and waiting, we might like to stay to see what happens. The man from the Irish Times suggests we take a vote. Eleven hands shoot up in favour of staying. Mine stays by my suddenly sobered side.

In the corridor I meet an American ‘adviser’ that my fellow journalists tell me is ‘obviously CIA’. I tell him how my colleagues have just voted, and that I am out of my depth. The last article I wrote for The Spectator was about life without mains drainage. I am only here because none of the real journalists that the editor invited first was able to come. I joke that a septic tank correspondent is hardly qualified to comment on the events that are unfolding. ‘On the contrary,’ he says without smiling. ‘You’re in your element. We’re in deep shit. You tell your friends that dead journalists don’t write stories. I am going to see if I can get a car to take me to the Turkish border.’

Before I can ask him to take me with him, he’s gone, and Babu has summoned the rest of us back to the table, which is now covered in white linen and set out for a great feast. It seems a strange way to prepare for an invasion, but there’s not much else we can do. A curfew has been declared, and the city’s power supply has been cut. Our building has its own generator, but in the rest of Batumi all is black. We are asked if we would like to make any telephone calls before supper. Eleven Western news desks are immediately contacted. I call my wife and tell her that with luck, I’ll be just a day or two late.

There’s a lot of wine on the table, and by the fifth course, my mood has moved from apprehensiveness via bravado to resignation. As the last plates are cleared Babu appears, and tells us that he has arranged somewhere safe for us to stay, and that he hopes the crisis will be resolved by the time we meet again tomorrow. He proposes a toast to us all, drunk in Adjaran honey-flavoured vodka. I compliment him on its excellence as we leave.

We are driven through the blackout to the huge Intourist hotel on the seafront. It has hundreds of rooms, but we are the only guests. Men with machine-guns man the desk and guard the cavernous lobby in which a bubble of fuzzy light surrounds a single bulb connected to a car battery. I am shown to room 323 by a woman with a torch. She takes it with her when she goes. I feel my way to bed, and try not to imagine what might happen if that troop train actually turns up.

But it doesn’t. The next morning we are gathered to be given a press release announcing that a coup attempt has been frustrated by the refusal of troops to fight their countrymen, and by the presence of foreign journalists in Batumi, who had warned the free world what was about to happen. So that’s what it has all been about. We have been used. I say as much to the man beside me, and he tells me to keep my counsel until we are safely home.

Minutes later, I am the last to arrive at the aircraft. The engines are already running and seat belts are being fastened, but just as I reach the door a man in a black jacket and a shoulder holster takes my arm and points to a Mercedes standing on the tarmac. As he leads me back down the steps my knees weaken and images from black-and-white spy movies rush into in my head. I’ve been rumbled. They’ve found out I am a fraud, and they’re offended. No — worse — they’ve been taping the comments I have been making to my colleagues, and I’m for the chop.

When we reach the car, a window rolls down to reveal the face of Aslan Abashidze. My God, this must be serious! But he is smiling. I smile weakly back. He nods to the man beside him, who gets out and hands me two carrier bags. There are six bottles of honey vodka in each. ‘You like it!’ says Babu. ‘It’s a gift: traditional Georgian hospitality!’

I thank him with an intensity that seems to surprise him, and I promise to write about it.

]]>Certain cities, like certain men, have the instant power to seduce. Seville, I’ve discovered, is one. Romantic, classically handsome and oozing charm, it offers glimpses of a fascinating past, combined with irresistible joie de vivre. This is a city utterly committed to pleasure. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that it’s also the city which inspired the legend of Don Juan.

I think I’ve probably met more than my fair share of Don Juans, but I couldn’t resist the chance to meet the original. Yes, he was dead, but he has also been brought thrillingly to life in The Lost Diary of Don Juan (Orion, £12.99), which has already sold in 25 countries. Frank McCourt — himself no stranger to the bestseller list — has described it as ‘a magic carpet of a book, a picaresque adventure that will have you clawing yourself with pleasure’. Mass sales seem assured — not least since its author, Douglas Carlton Abrams, shares an agent with Dan Brown.

I’m afraid the book didn’t have me clawing myself with pleasure — not, in any case, my top leisure-time pursuit — but I can see how fans of The Da Vinci Code and its ilk might enjoy this bodice-ripping jaunt through the ancient alleyways of Seville. And as a portrait of a city, and an age, it is evocative. The novel — so punctiliously researched that drafts were checked by church historians and scholars of 16th-century swordsmanship — takes the reader on a picturesque journey, starting off at the Alcazar and continuing in the winding streets, and bedchambers, of the Barrio de Santa Cruz. It’s a journey that involves an exhausting number of romantic conquests. Our own journey, thank goodness, was a lot more leisurely, and punctuated with fortifying snacks (five- or six-course meals, actually), excellent Spanish wine and so-dry-it-makes-your-tongue-tingle Manzanilla sherry.

‘There comes a time in a man’s life,’ says one of the characters in Abrams’s novel, ‘when food looks more desirable than a woman.’ I can’t speak for men, of course, but by 10 o’clock on the first evening of our little press trip to Seville, I was, to use McCourt’s phrase, almost clawing myself with hunger. We were to eat at the Cortijo El Aguila Real, an old ranch set in rolling countryside outside Seville — and we were clearly operating on a Spanish timetable. When we finally got there, we stuffed down the delicate slivers of Iberian jamon like Americans launching into a bucket of KFC. After a blitz on the canapés, and some smalltalk with my counterparts from Israel, Finland, Italy and South Korea, I took my seat next to Abrams. Hollywood-handsome, he could easily star in the film of his book. His wife, who looks a bit like Brook Shields, was sitting opposite. They are still, after 19 years together, conspicuously in love. Abrams’s Don Juan is clearly fiction.

It was Abrams — bestselling author of several guides to sexuality including The Multi-Orgasmic Man — who led us on our journey in the footsteps of Don Juan, accompanied by Antonio, a charming local guide. Our first stop, echoing the first seduction in the novel, was the Alcazar, the vast complex of buildings transformed in the 14th century from a Muslim fortress into a royal palace. I had vaguely heard of it, but I wasn’t prepared for its beauty. With its intricate carving, exquisite tiles, peaceful courtyards and gardens full of fountains and orange trees, it is a stunning mix of architectural styles — ‘Mudéjar’ is, I think, the word used for this Judaeo-Islamic-Catholic combination — just as lovely as Granada’s Alhambra, and much less crowded.

As we emerged from the palace, we were assailed by a fierce-looking young woman in a richly brocaded 16th-century dress. She could have stepped out of a Velázquez. She had, in fact, stepped out of Abrams’s book, courtesy of Antonio and the resourceful Seville tourist board. This, it soon became clear, was ‘the Infanta’, King Philip II’s favourite child, and one of Abrams’s Don Juan’s myriad conquests. If she was as terrifying in the book as she was in real life (or what passed for it in the weird postmodern universe into which we’d apparently stepped), then it was something of a miracle that he ever got near her at all. It was a relief to get away.

Outside Don Juan’s house in the Jewish Quarter, the Barrio de Santa Cruz — or, at least, the house which has popped up in legends enough to warrant a plaque — we met Don Juan. Resplendent in doublet and hose and little velvet hat, he was a lot less scary than the Infanta. Around the corner, in a pretty square full of orange trees, we met him again. This time, he was silent and immobile. Ever since Tirso de Molina’s 1630 play The Trickster of Seville, Don Juan has been a central figure in literature and art. Clearly wanting to honour a citizen (albeit a fictional citizen) who has inspired the likes of Molière, Goldoni, Mozart and even the Pet Shop Boys, the authorities in Seville have erected a statue.

There were no more brocaded figures on the rest of our trip to Seville, but there were plenty of other surprises: the pretty town of Carmona, on a hillside east of Seville; the breathtaking scale of the cathedral and the astonishing views from its bell tower; the baroque buildings and lily ponds of the Parque de Maria Luisa — and, of course, this being Spain, the blood-chilling grandeur of the bull ring. We watched some flamenco-dancing — a woman so sultry that she made the Infanta seem anodyne — and we wallowed in warm pools in the ancient Arab baths.

This is a city of startling splendours and brilliant sunshine. It’s a city where, even in early March, you can eat tapas outside at midnight. It’s a city with which you can fall in love; and cities, I think, don’t break your heart.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/29097/travels-with-don-juan/feed/0Bag a McNabhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/29095/bag-a-mcnab/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/29095/bag-a-mcnab/#commentsSat, 21 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=29095Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover… Read more

]]>Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover — stockbrokers, traders and lawyers who are swapping their pinstripes for plus-fours of a weekend, and heading to the country for a spot of shooting. Hunting with foxes may be in abeyance but when the roe deer stalking season begins on the first of next month, there will be more takers than ever, and all the big banks have started organising shooting days at venues like Bisley and the Royal Berkshire Shooting Ground.

The Holy Grail for this new breed of young, competitive hunters is something called the ‘McNab’. Bagging a McNab involves shooting a deer and a brace of grouse and catching a salmon on the same estate in a 24-hour period, though any would-be McNabbers will need to wait until August for the various hunting seasons to coincide.

The term McNab is derived from John Buchan’s 1925 novel John Macnab, which revolves around the efforts of three bored London clubmen to spice up their lives by going poaching on three Scottish estates. After informing the landowners of their intention to hunt game on their estates under the pseudonym John Macnab, they go ahead with their jaunts, with dramatic results. For some of the more inexperienced guests at Donald Trump’s sporting estate at Menie in Aberdeenshire amused locals invented the Menie McNab, which allegedly involves shooting a cormorant — a protected species — a Highland cow and a beater! And the highlight of the year for many City hunters is the McNab Challenge, organised by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), which takes place on 25 August.

One man who’ll definitely be there is Mike Pullen, head of EU and competition law at the City law firm DLA Piper. ‘Since I started shooting last April, I’ve been out 15 times, for one, two or three days at a time,’ he says. ‘We go out to the West Country a lot, near Glastonbury, and also to West Suffolk.’ Not that Pullen restricts himself to mainland Britain. He has been boar-hunting in France and shoots ‘plains game’ in South Africa, which includes breeds such as antelope, onyx and zebra. All of which, he points out, are shot for the pot. But as Pullen found out, the tools of the trade didn’t come cheap. His Browning shotgun set him back about £1,000, a Blazer hunting rifle with telescopic sights took the total to £3,000, and when he invested in ‘a good pair of Leica binoculars’ another £1,800 was added to the bill.

Pullen is keen to stress the conservation aspects of his sport and the fact that with no wolves around to keep down the deer population, predatory City boys make one of the better alternatives. ‘The main reason deer die is because their teeth wear away and they can’t eat,’ he says. ‘The only alternative to stalking is industrial killing methods such as gassing.’ But while he is a keen deer-stalker, Pullen is opposed to the concept of what is known as ‘canned game’ — animals bred for shooting. His enthusiasm for his new sport even extends to butchery, and he has learned to ‘grallock’ a dead deer on the hill, i.e., remove its insides — a vital skill if the weather is warm and the corpse is not to go off.

Nor does his hobby affect the renewal of the various species, as the dates of the hunting seasons are carefully calibrated so as not to interfere with breeding programmes. The grouse shooting starts on the Glorious Twelfth (12 August) and ends in December, the roe deer season starts on 1 April and continues well into October, but remember not to jump the buck: the hunting season for the does begins at the end of the buck-shooting season in October and continues into the New Year.

Hand in hand with this City-led hunting boom has come a revival in the fortunes of the Highland estates. Once dismissed as draughty castles surrounded by terrible weather, they are increasingly becoming goldmines as free-spending City types sign up for Highland shooting sprees.

There are obvious parallels for today’s City gents between their day jobs and this newly popular leisure pursuit. Much of the financial world’s vocabulary is borrowed from the hunting field — words and phrases such as stalking, setting your sights, going in for the kill, and the like. Hunting seems to suit the City slickers’ go-getting, if not aggressive, approach to life. And for the really intrepid hunter, who reckons firing off a shot from some distant vantage point is a little too tame, a new challenge is available: boar-hunting with knives. Yes, some people are mad enough to believe that the ultimate thrill involves jumping on the back of a retreating boar and stabbing it to death.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/29095/bag-a-mcnab/feed/0Heaven on earthhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28700/heaven-on-earth/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28700/heaven-on-earth/#commentsSat, 24 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=28700Visiting graveyards on holiday is not just for genealogists and military historians; it’s for lovers of art and poetry, and for anyone with an interest in what their own memorial… Read more

]]>Visiting graveyards on holiday is not just for genealogists and military historians; it’s for lovers of art and poetry, and for anyone with an interest in what their own memorial might look like.

Everybody visits the cemeteries of Highgate in London and Père Lachaise in Paris, but there is an almost greater pleasure to be had in discovering a small town cemetery or country churchyard, beside the sea or in the mountains, that is the resting place of a particular hero.

Visiting Barnoon Cemetery in St Ives is not on the list of things to do in that particular seaside town, but it should be. Its location is five-star: perched high above Porthmeor Beach and Tate St Ives, it has 180˚ views over the sea to Clodgy Point and the Godrevy Lighthouse. It is a tidy, well-kept Victorian cemetery, and it is full. The predominantly grey, granite graves are closely packed, so finding the burial place of the artist and mariner Alfred Wallis is not easy, particularly as his tomb is low on the ground, but it is certainly worth the hunt.

Wallis lies beneath horizontal painted tiles which depict a small man climbing the steps towards the open door of a tall lighthouse (the sort he painted). It is the work of potter Bernard Leach, a memorial by one of St Ives’s best-known and best-loved artists to another.

Further north on the Cornish coast, close to the 11th tee on the St Enodoc golf course, in the graveyard of St Enodoc Church, an ornately carved slate headstone, now embellished with lichen, marks the final resting place of the poet laureate John Betjeman. Whoever chose the spot chose well. It looks over the golf course to Bray Hill, the Camel Estuary and Damer Bay.

The church, within walking distance of Rock and Trebetherick and lunching distance of Padstow, is known variously as Sanctus Wenodocus, St Guinedocus, Sinking Nedy and Edith Chapel, and it has a slightly comical air with its crude 13th-century broach spire. It nestles into the folds of the golf course, and there are credible stories that in earlier times it was completely buried by sand, so that the vicar had to gain entry through a trapdoor. Here also lies Fleur Lombard, who died in 1996, aged 21, fighting a fire in Bristol, the first female firefighter to die in civil action in Britain.

The tower of Morwenstow Church is just visible from the Cornish coastal path north of Sharpnose Point. The wind ensures that the short walk from the path to the church and its surrounding churchyard is easy. The same westerly wind has blown many ships on to the rocks below the church and provided the churchyard with its most famous memorial, the ghostly white ship’s figurehead, with sword and shield that belonged to the Caledonia of Arbroath, wrecked off Higher Sharpnose on a homeward voyage from Odessa in September 1842. Currently under restoration, the figurehead marks the burial place of the ship’s captain, Peter Stevenson, who lost his life along with all but one of his crew, when he was about 28 years old.

It is thought that as many as 40 sailors are buried in this churchyard, where at one time three upturned keels were placed with oars forming a rough cross. The Revd Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar for 40 years of the Church of St Morwenna and St John The Baptist at Morwenstow, described the wreck of the Caledonia in his memoirs, entitled Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall (1870). Hawker, winner of the Newdigate Prize for Poetry and clearly a man of action as well as of good works, is considered to be the instigator of the Harvest Festival. He also rebuilt the vicarage, which sits below the church, and built Hawker’s Hut, which snuggles into the coastal path and was where he went to sit and think and write.

As graveyards by the sea are inevitably filled with memorials to lost sailors, many far from home, so graveyards in the mountains tell tales of lost climbers brought together from many countries by a shared love of climbing. In the graveyard of the Roman Catholic church in Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn in Switzerland, one headstone, with an ice axe attached to it, says simply, ‘I chose to climb’. English, American, Swiss men, mostly in their twenties, some younger, lie here side by side.

At St Peter’s, the English church in Zermatt, the body of the Revd Charles Hudson, who was among the first climbers to reach the summit of the Matterhorn on 14 July 1865, and also among those who fell to their deaths later the same day, is now interred beneath the altar. He was originally buried in the Roman Catholic churchyard before St Peter’s was built. The gravestones of Douglas Hadow and Michel Croz, who lost their lives alongside Hudson, are to be seen on the east side of the Zermatt churchyard, near the village church.

It is, however, the poet Robert Graves, perhaps appropriately, who has the burial place that comes closest to heaven on earth. He lies within view of both the mountains and the sea in the tiny hilltop churchyard of Deia, on the west coast of Majorca. The sun rises over the mountains and sets over the sea. In the spring, orange and lemon blossom fills the valley below; olive trees are dotted about the hills; sheep, goats and donkeys graze in the fields. People gather and chatter in and around the churchyard. Graves’s grave is unmemorable, a rough inscription in cement, but its location is unforgettable.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28700/heaven-on-earth/feed/0The essence of Spainhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28419/the-essence-of-spain/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28419/the-essence-of-spain/#commentsSat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=28419Spain doesn’t smell the same any more. At the airport, the very first impression used to be of bitter black tobacco smoke, more acrid than Balkan Sobranie, a harbinger of… Read more

]]>Spain doesn’t smell the same any more. At the airport, the very first impression used to be of bitter black tobacco smoke, more acrid than Balkan Sobranie, a harbinger of stronger smells beyond Customs.

That smoke would follow you wherever human activity was to be found. It was the cantus firmus in the polyphony of smells flying up from a culture being itself. On the station platform a drift of smoke would bind together the passengers waiting far too early, as is their habit, for a train: the conscript going back to his village on weekend leave or the countryman and his wife, a cardboard box knotted with string at their feet. The cigarette ends would roll into the grooves of the tiled platform for a few minutes until an overalled woman swept them into her plastic dustpan on a long stick.

The law of 26 December 2005, a fateful feast of Stephen, the first martyr, broke this unifying constant. Bars now have to declare whether they are smoking or non-smoking. There’s no smoking on trains (except by the drivers, as passengers in the front compartment can jealously detect near the door into the cab), or in your office, or kiosk, or barber’s shop, or at your lathe, in a brothel or on your balcony. Certainly not at the airport.

The same black smoke that once welcomed the traveller also underlay the boisterous smells of a busy bar at noon. The smoke curled up around the hanging hams dropping their year-slow fat into little paper umbrellas stuck in their lowest points to catch it. Cigarette ends nestled among the discarded sugar sachets from dozens of morning cups of coffee (for it is not impolite, but quite the done thing, to throw bits of rubbish on the bar floor), soon to be joined by the legs and heads of tapas prawns, wooden toothpicks, the skins from slices of morcilla (that earthy black pudding), olive stones, oil-spotted paper serviettes fresh from fingers and lips busy with squares of tuna, bits of artichoke, meatballs, battered whitebait, potato tortilla, little pastry purses of minced meat. At 2 p.m. women’s high heels and men’s loafers (always clean) shuffled through the detritus to the door, bound for home and a solid lunch.

Tobacco smoke united town and country, but the triad of smells peculiar to the countryside remain woodsmoke, dust and stale urine. Certainly, stale urine plays an heroic part in urban smellscapes, too, but that is the human variety, transformed by a few hours’ maturation in alleys and corners, under arches and in doorways. A hot country with rare rain develops a well-mixed palette of smells on its pavements. In the country it is the stale urine of horses, the effluvia of goats and donkeys. On a bright May morning a score of yellow butterflies dance on the damp patch from a passing mule on the dusty path.

Woodsmoke is at its harshest on a burning summer afternoon, but suggests stirring life on a mountain morning, in drifts above a row of little houses in a freezing dawn. Spain, on the Greenwich meridian, observes double summer time, so if you get up at eight on an April day, it is still only six by the sun.

But on a La Mancha afternoon, when the sun burns on the skin like a plate foolishly grabbed when it is too hot, woodsmoke is an irritant in league with the parching dust. Dust is invasive. It coats shoes, lies on seats, returns to the zaguan — the dark lobby inside the street door of a house — from which a housewife not long before vigorously banished it with a damp mop. Dust annoys the nostrils and reddens the eyes. There is a proverb, Por los ojos el codo — ‘The elbow for wiping the eyes’. It doesn’t sound much of a proverb, until you realise that a century ago, one in 30 of the people of Seville had lost the sight of at least one eye from ophthalmic disease. Even a generation ago every corner had its blind lottery seller, who knew everyone and everything that was going on.

The blind lottery seller must have noticed when people began to smell different. Once, in the morning, in a bus or in church, a surface smell of cologne was present. It was a matter of what smell you decided to notice. The cologne signified a fresh beginning. But in the 1970s deodorants became popular. They presupposed an underlying lack of smelliness. If merely applied on top of a well-established smell, they became as unappetising as icing on a fishcake. And the deodorants that came in then were of a heavy kind: the better ones like fly-spray, the worse like cats.

In any case, what makes people really smelly is their clothes, and Spanish men at least were notable for their clean shirts, prepared with great labour at the open-air lavaderos, the sheds where women knelt at stone troughs through which fresh cold water ran. It was said that the women enjoyed the conversation, a line of argument like that explaining how much foxes enjoy the chase. The lavadero has gone, though hand-washing continues unseen inside many a block of flats, outside which clothes hang on plastic lines and pulleys.

Spanish women can be smelly, too, because their dresses are less easily laundered, though in poor districts of big cities they now wear the sort of shapeless leisure-wear familiar in Britain. But most Spanish women still cook, and cooking means a frizz of olive oil, fish, paprika and garlic in the air that clings to the hair. Generally, though, that mix disappears into the background noise of smell.

Take garlic. Everyone eats it but, like the cow dung piled in yards and spattering the narrow ways of pastoral villages, it sinks into the canvas of life. There are plenty of strong competitors. On a Saturday afternoon in the sort of bar frequented by men in hats (there’s a good example on the far side of the Roman bridge at Cordoba), where the motor-racing blares from an unnoticed television in one corner and the concussion of slapped-down dominoes snaps from a table, the ordinary customer has already eaten half a dozen strong flavours: anchovies, garlic, fish, onions, tomatoes, pig fat, before starting on a little cup of dark black coffee and a slightly larger glass of brandy (Veterano or Insuperable), with a solid cigar. And between the dominoes table and the bar, the door of the lavatories stands half open.

All bathrooms in Spain smell. They do not all smell as bad as they did. It might be something to do with EU norms on plumbing, but even expensive hotels have smelly drains. Shut the door of your ensuite bathroom, and a couple of hours later open the door again, and you will discover the smell that you have spared your bedroom. Again, it is partly a matter of advertence.

The Spanish character has been accused of solipsism, of taking no cognisance of the world outside. That is unfair. But I was surprised one day in Santander to find a mother talking to her friend on a bench in a square while the children played, and the bench was set above the grille of a drain that stank. No more notice was accorded the stench than would be given to a loud busker outside a church where people are praying or to an importunate beggar wheedling near the faces of a group of people standing at a bar. Blank it, and it’s no problem.

Oh, but how smells tug at the memory of a stranger. The curious fragrance of blackberry and apple pie from the wild roses of the Guadarrama foothills; exhaust fumes in a dim provincial bus station; the heady anise of the early-morning workmen’s café; sawdust through the open door of a carpenter’s shop; orange blossom in a street; the dough of churros seething in oil; the tang of the fishmarket; hot wax from a hundred burning lights before a popular Virgin; the churning brown waters of the Ebro in flood; partridges cooking with cloves.

Mantenga la ciudad limpia y hermosa, says the public notice, which may be rendered as an English jingle, ‘Keep the city clean and pretty’. But the cleaner it all becomes, the less Spain will smell of its distinctive culture.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28419/the-essence-of-spain/feed/0Enchanted islandhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28418/enchanted-island/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28418/enchanted-island/#commentsSat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=28418‘Excuse me, madam, you are writing for a Buddhist priest?’ For a moment, I was confused — but then enlightenment struck. No, I assured the waiter, whose smile was, indeed,… Read more

]]>‘Excuse me, madam, you are writing for a Buddhist priest?’ For a moment, I was confused — but then enlightenment struck. No, I assured the waiter, whose smile was, indeed, like the Buddha’s, the pieces I was writing were for the British press. After a few days in Sri Lanka, however, I could see how writing for a Buddhist priest might well make much more sense.

Buddhas are everywhere in this beautiful country, a country whose Sinhalese name means ‘enchanted island’ and which Marco Polo described as ‘the finest small island in the world’. It is a country which has inspired writers from Paul Bowles to Neruda and Chekhov, a country whose riches and spices have caught the eye, and invading armies, of not one European nation, but three. Early Arab traders called it ‘Serendhib’, a word which has become a synonym for the making of happy accidents by chance. And this is a country full of happy accidents. Buddhist and Hindu temples nestle alongside Catholic churches and mosques. Christmas is celebrated and so is Diwali and so are poyas, the full-moon days when alcohol is forbidden. But not, thank goodness, for tourists.

Not all the accidents in Sri Lanka have been happy, of course. Colonialism — Arab, Portuguese, Dutch and British — brought the messy legacy it always does. The country’s religiously diverse population (70 per cent Buddhist, 15 per cent Hindu, 7.5 per cent Christian and 7.5 per cent Muslim) may live together in unusual harmony, but the bloody conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the national government continues. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there was the tsunami — that giant wave which rose up out of nowhere, killing 32,000 people and wiping out whole communities. The evidence is everywhere: in the Ministries of Resettlement and Disaster Relief Services you pass in Colombo, in the signs dotting the coast for a ‘Family Help Programme’ or ‘Dutch resettlement project’, and in the abandoned ruins of so many homes.

Struggling to recover from a tragedy which Buddhists, Christians and Hindus could only explain as ‘fate’, Sri Lanka is desperate for tourists. And it treats them with astonishing warmth. The pilot greets you not just with ‘Ayubowan’, the standard Sri Lankan greeting, which means ‘May you live a long life’, but with the traditional Buddhist ‘blessings of the triple gem’. The visa form welcomes you ‘to the socialist democratic republic of Sri Lanka’ and the airport, a gleaming modern building which appears to double as an electrical goods emporium, is a model of socialist-democratic efficiency. And then there was Luxman, a Catholic named after a Hindu god – for the next few days, my driver and guide.

After a night, and a fabulous massage, at Ayurveda Pavilions, a beautiful hotel in Negombo which specialises in the ancient health system of ayurveda, I was ready to head north for some history. First, however, there were elephants. I tend to like my animals well done on a plate, but even I found myself oohing and aahing at Pinnawela. Set up in 1975 to look after seven orphaned baby elephants, the orphanage now boasts a population of about 70, ranging from newborns to elderly matriarchs, and including Raja, blinded in an accident, and Sama, who lost a leg in a landmine. Literally coated in mud from the rain, which hadn’t stopped all day, they huddled in little groups, trying in vain to scrape it off. Later, they gave up and lumbered to the river for a bath. Immobile, they were hard to distinguish from the rocks, but when they did move it was with a strange beauty and sweetness that seemed almost like some kind of metaphor for their country.

There was more wildlife at my next stop, Vil Uyana, a new eco-resort and wetland nature reserve near the ancient rock citadel of Sigiriya. From my balcony, I could watch a peacock dancing in the dusk. Over breakfast the next morning, the waiter pointed out great egrets, a spotted dove and a crocodile. It set the tone for a day in which breathtaking spectacle swiftly became the norm.

It isn’t hard to see why Sigiriya has been described as the eighth wonder of the world. Inscriptions in the caves of the great rock, which looms over the countryside, indicate that it was a place of religious retreat as far back as the 3rd century bc. It was in the 5th century ad, however, that Kassapa, one of the two sons of King Dhatusena, constructed the citadel, complete with palaces, painted caves and water gardens. You can climb right up to the summit, 200 metres high, passing on the way the 5th-century painted beauties known as the Sigiriya Damsels, and the Mirror Wall, covered in the ancient graffiti they inspired. In his poem about Sigiriya, Michael Ondaatje wrote: ‘Women like you/ make men pour out their hearts’. They are certainly well endowed.

From Sigiriya, we went straight to Polonnaruwa, the great ruined capital of Sri Lanka, which boasted its first royal residence in the 4th century. It reached its heyday in the 12th century and was finally abandoned in 1293, when the capital was moved to Kurunegala. Stretched out over about 16 square kilometres, the ruins, which include temples, palaces and a stunning array of statues, are astonishingly well preserved. You could take days to explore them. Sadly, I had a few hours.

You could, in fact, spend months exploring the historical treasures of Sri Lanka. Like most people escaping a British winter, however, I wanted a taste of sea and sun. I did visit the fabulous cave temples at Dambulla. I went to a literary festival in the beautiful old Dutch fort in the southern port of Galle. I saw ancient carved puppet masks. I met fishermen and cinnamon-peelers and wood-carvers. And I stood on a hillside at Weligama, gazing out at the sea and the sunset and the fishermen perched on their stilts and vowed that I would come back: ‘standing in sunlight/ wanting more’, as Ondaatje says in his poem ‘Wells’.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28418/enchanted-island/feed/0An epic journeyhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28417/an-epic-journey/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28417/an-epic-journey/#commentsSat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=28417Taking a gap year at 40 did not initially seem like a very sensible idea. I had a good business, a nice flat and everything was relatively rosy — so… Read more

]]>Taking a gap year at 40 did not initially seem like a very sensible idea. I had a good business, a nice flat and everything was relatively rosy — so it still beats me why I chose to jeopardise it all. I suppose I should blame my cousin’s girlfriend, for it was she who largely put me up it. Two years ago, over lunch on Mykonos, I blurted out that someone should write a book about travelling around the Greek islands. Don’t know why I came up with the idea, I just did. But of course it seemed a ridiculous notion really, totally impractical, so I thought nothing more about it and returned to London.

Then, one October evening, I scribbled an itinerary, from Venice to Istanbul — more a romantic ‘what if’ than anything else — and the more I doodled, the more the idea grew on me: 2,000 islands, the Aegean and all that history! It would be a modern odyssey. A few months later the project had begun to consume my every waking moment and London seemed like a prison cell by comparison, dull and tiresome. I talked about it to friends and discovered that far from being derisory, they were full of a furtive longing to come too. One senior partner in a top PR consultancy confided that were it not for school fees he too would have joined me. So I began to plan and to save in earnest.

The Greek islands were meant to be visited by sea. Why else would the Greeks have placed a folly like the portal for the Temple of the Delian Apollo on a hillock overlooking Naxos harbour? So it seemed right that I should begin my journey on a boat. I left Venice on a ship bound for Crete, looking the Campanile straight in the eye.

Ferries come in all shapes, ages and sizes. My favourites were the old boats, belching black smoke, reeking of diesel and held together by paint and goodwill; chaotic passengers piled high like left luggage. The worst were the hydrofoils. Being a passenger on these old Russian machines was a disorientating experience — like being driven at speed in a tumble dryer with a large brick in it. At least they keep the sickbag industry alive. But the ferries were a piece of cake compared with the uncharted waters of Greek travel agencies. You need a degree in obstinacy to get anywhere with them and they presented one of the biggest challenges of my year out.

Money was also a worry. During my gap year at 19, I never had a budget — just a bag of money, a ticket and a handful of addresses — but this gap year was different. This time, I didn’t want to slum it as completely as I had done 20 years previously, so I confess that at times I treated myself to the odd week somewhere really splendid, like Pandeli’s Taverna on the island of Marathi, where I did nothing except swim, eat myself stupid, drink everything in sight, and sleep. And while I did my best to take buses, there was the occasional ‘sod it, I’ll take a taxi’.

The worst dinner I had was on Symi, where I ate the best meal in Greece but was served by a waiter with the compassion of the Addams family. And the best? A plate of sausage and chips washed down with cold beer in the little harbour of Neapoli, after a shattering 18-hour bus journey.

What was my favourite place? I had favourites everywhere — Kefalonia with its impressive mountains, the magical mediaeval walled city of Rhodes, the delights of Amorgos, partying on Mykonos and the tranquil beauty of the monasteries of Mount Athos. On Skyros, where Rupert Brooke is buried, I got caught in a landslide. On Delos, with its poorly labelled piles of ancient marble and endless statuary, there were so many tourists I worked out that it would be possible to enter a building on an English tour, listen to the French group and leave with the Italians. Swimming off Kythera, I was chased out of a cave by a monk seal.

At the end of my year, I was ready to come home. Home to a country that I now recognised as being quietly obsessed with traffic, good manners, and whose capital is the envy of Europe. Was I changed? I don’t know, but I do think I am now a more contented 40-year-old, rather than a twenty-something living in a body twice his age. And what did I achieve? Well — a journey that few have undertaken and that was the envy of every Greek I spoke to. I visited 36 islands and every island chain, not to mention the Greek mainland and Turkey too. I completed a journey of over 4,500 miles in 183 days; a total of 314 hours’ continuous travel: 55 sea passages on 32 ferries, three hydrofoils and one fishing caique, a seaplane, one twin-prop aircraft, 11 buses, two trains, an open-top Land Rover and a duck-egg-blue 1963 Morris Oxford.

And three useful tips: always take a tie. You never know when you will need it. Always carry a freshly laundered spotted handkerchief; it defines you as more British than the passport ever will. Never buy suntan cream in a hurry: the shimmery stuff is impossible to get off.

Harry Bucknall’s book, In the Dolphin’s Wake, will be published early next year.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28417/an-epic-journey/feed/0Beaches and creamhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28416/beaches-and-cream/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/28416/beaches-and-cream/#commentsSat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=28416Sydney is an opium den for lifestyle junkies, a hotbed of food-loving, sun-seeking sport enthusiasts. I realised this the first time I went to Bondi Beach. Unless you’re armed with… Read more

]]>Sydney is an opium den for lifestyle junkies, a hotbed of food-loving, sun-seeking sport enthusiasts. I realised this the first time I went to Bondi Beach. Unless you’re armed with a soya latte, yoga mat, designer bikini or designer in a bikini, you won’t make it past the BMW-filled car-park.

I had none of these when I moved to Sydney last year. I moved to get a break from London, which is cool and great for old buildings but also grey, expensive and generally dirty. Living in London isn’t easy. Living in Sydney is. It’s among the sunniest, cleanest and best-looking cities in the world. And full of Brits like me. They’re everywhere, overcaffeinated and sunburnt. Sod congestion-charging and the M4 at rush hour — they want the smell of barista-made coffee in the morning and warm melanoma-spawning sun on their skin.

I decided to give myself a year out of the rat-race to live in corpulent comfort. When I told British friends I was going to Sydney, they reacted as though I had opted out of real life to exile myself in Toytown. Or as one put it, ‘running away to a cultural backwater with a whole lot of convicts’.

Sitting outside a restaurant at Bronte Beach on my second day in exile, still wet from the sea, drinking a delicious Chardonnay and eating salt-and-chilli squid looking out over the waves, I could have wept for joy over life in the backwater. Sydney may be a cultural infant compared with London, Paris and Rome, but so what? It’s got better food — yes, really — and beaches. If this all sounds terribly superficial, it is — and unashamedly so.

Arriving from an English winter, you feel like a consumptive chimney sweep. Sydney is healthy, toned and well-groomed, and so is just about everyone in it. We are talking well-dressed beach culture.

The most popular beach with pretty young things in vintage swimwear is North Bondi. On summer weekends, it becomes irritatingly crowded with trendies, so I moved along to Tamarama. Known locally as ‘Glamarama’, it’s a similar, smaller place to be seen, which I absolutely didn’t want to be. So, after battling in flipflops along a breathtaking cliff walk joining the beaches, I laid my towel to rest at Bronte. It’s less pretentious, with a reliable mixture of glamour, nice restaurants and family BBQs.

With the help of a car, an even better discovery was the harbour beaches. Parsley Bay, Camp Cove and Nielsen’s Park are secluded, stupidly beautiful and good for having a proper swim in less treacherous waters. They also have shark nets, which I found improve the restorative quality of your swim immeasurably.

If, quite sensibly, you’re not a fan of tumbling surf, there is a clutch of ocean-water pools less easy to drown in. Icebergs at Bondi is the most famous, but Wylie’s Baths at Coogee is just as good-looking and more family-friendly. Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool, nestled discreetly in the central Botanical Gardens, is the harbour choice for urban swimmers in the know. Expect Speedos and Louis Vuitton towel bags and go with a word of warning — leave the fast lane to the body-hair-free locals.

Since I am not a big one for exerting myself in the name of physical health, I was relieved to discover that not all Sydney’s natural beauty means exercise. The city’s views and climate breed cafés. The place is seriously serious about coffee made by seriously trained baristas. They even have Latte Art competitions.

The standard flat white (like a latte but stronger and less frothy) doesn’t even exist in the UK except at one Soho café run by Australians called Flat White. Most people in Sydney have a favourite local barista they are devoted to. I whored about a bit and found them all to be pretty wonderful.

Alarmingly, this coffee-loving outdoorsy life has an affection for early mornings. Like most Londoners in their twenties, I was bred to crawl under cover of darkness from bed to work to pub and back to bed. In Sydney people wake up at six, go for a swim and meet for an early breakfast. I accepted the breakfast and slept through the rest.

Soon, my standard greasy-spoon hangover cure was replaced by avocado and lime on toasted sourdough, granola, honey, yogurt and fruit or toasted banana bread. What’s staggering is that you are offered this menu pretty much anywhere, and cheaply — no more than $12 (£5).

Of course, there are hotspots whose prices hover around the $25 (£10) mark. Bill Granger’s restaurant in Darlinghurst is a breakfast institution, while the new favourite, raved about for its fluoro-yellow eggs, is the Book Kitchen in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills. For me, heaven on a breakfast plate lay at Le Petit Crème in King’s Cross, with its perfect poached oeufs, crispy bacon and a trademark bowl of coffee. But that could have been my Euro-nostalgia.

It’s true that Sydney has a silver spoon lodged in its gourmet mouth. There are the old favourites, of course — Vegemite, pavlovas and a coconut-and-chocolate-smothered sponge-cake miracle called the Lamington — but the city has fantastic natural produce and an immigrant population (Italians, Greeks, Vietnamese and Cantonese) who make the most of it.

Bondi Beach is flanked by two food institutions. The Hollywood-friendly Icebergs, named after the aforementioned pool it overlooks, is at one end and the more cosy and affordable North Bondi Italian is at the other. I once saw the daughter of a former Australian premier pin the actor Owen Wilson against a wall of the Icebergs bar with her hips and it rather put me off the place, but that kind of carry-on among a clientele that includes Paris Hilton and Heath Ledger, only seems to boost its appeal.

In between is Sean’s Panaroma, which has great, fresh food and a beautiful Bondi view. Dinner costs about $180 (£70) for two without wine, which isn’t cheap but is still ten times more delicious than the paparazzi-stalked, overpriced UK equivalents. Billy Kwong, Long Grain and Tetsuya are among the best Asian-influenced menus about.

It’s just very, very easy to eat out every night and be thrilled in Sydney, which is fine if you’re Jamie Packer. Sadly, the pound is strong but it’s not Samson. Proper foodies, not lazy me, head to the fresh-food markets and cheaper specialist restaurants in the ’burbs. In brief, Cabramatta is the place to head for Asian, Marrickville for Greek, and Leichhardt, Newtown or Haberfield for Italian.

I would follow an urge for seafood to Greg Doyle’s famous Pier Restaurant in Rose Bay, but the Sydney Fish Market in Blackwattle Bay (the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere) makes a very easy lunch out of the freshest of fresh prawns and crab.

I was spoilt by Sydney. My indulged appetite for delicious food was coupled with cheap weekly manicures, going to the cinema in a park with a view of the harbour and driving for an hour to extraordinary weekends away in Palm Beach and the Blue Mountains.

I arrived back at Heathrow healthy, with neat nails and a desperate need for a flat white. I had whinged about missing London’s glut of high-street shops, unparalleled galleries and generally cool edge, but by the time I got home all my edges had been rubbed off by Bondi sand.

What do you mean I have to pay £50 for an average meal? Why is it always raining? Pay £8 to drive into town — are you mad? Sydney is a dangerous place for Brits, Londoners especially. My recommendation is not to go unless you are damn sure you’ll hate every superficial moment of it.

]]>When you think of Barbados, you think of celebrities. Tony Blair’s annual holidays in Sir Cliff Richard’s villa; high-profile Hello! weddings on the beach or the golf course, like that of Tiger Woods or Jemma Kidd and the future Duke of Wellington; the absorbing sight of an enormous Luciano Pavarotti being gently decanted into the sea at Sandy Lane — whenever he stays at that most luxurious of hotels, he has an oven specially installed in his room so that he can cook pasta for all the family — all these combine to produce an image of a holiday island which is the exclusive preserve of the terminally rich.

This image is largely true. There are a lot of vast fortunes on Barbados. The Irish racing mafia which bought Sandy Lane some years ago have constructed enormous mansions with pilasters on the beach next to the hotel. The J.C. Bamford family, makers of ditch-diggers and of ditch-digger chic, own the lovely Heron Bay, a Palladian mansion worthy of the Veneto. The impossibly rich Rausings have converted their earnings from milk cartons into a vast lair on a promontory near Speightstown which, complete with ten-foot-high walkways and a forest of palm trees, recalls Mr Tracey’s island house in Thunderbirds: one expects the trees to part and a rocket to take off at any moment.

As a result, it is not difficult to bump into world-famous people in the ordinary course of a day at the beach in Barbados. I have myself sunbathed with Greg Rusedski on the raft in Sandy Lane bay (although he was unaware of his luck) while on my last trip there I struck up a holiday friendship with a honeymooning couple who had had Monica Lewinsky as one of their bridesmaids. They showed me the wedding snaps to prove it, and there she was, wearing a bright red dress and holding a posy, trying hard to look demure.

On the other hand, Barbados’s attraction for the very rich is a recent phenomenon. The island has always had fashionable people, to be sure, but it is only in the last decade that it has entered the superstar stratosphere. Prior to that, and in particular when I was spending most of my summer holidays there as a child in the 1970s, Barbados’s charm always seemed to lie precisely in the fact that it is slightly down-at-heel and even grungy, the very opposite of pretentious. This is still how I see the place. Whereas the fashionable travel magazines will now discuss at length which of the various swanky Zagat-rated restaurants you should patronise in the evening, my idea of a fun dinner out is to sit chewing a chicken roti on the beach outside our local Chefette, the nearest of a small chain of takeaway outlets which combine the aesthetic of American suburbia with the cuisine of your local tandoori.

And whereas the more adventurous guides will encourage you, for instance, to drive some way north to dine at the expensive Fish Pot, I prefer to make my way to one of the island’s numerous fish-fries which are tacked on to the fish markets. The biggest is in the southern port town of Oistins (the other south-coast fishing villages having been named Worthing, Hastings and Dover by the English colonists), but my own favourite is in a small seaside village called Half Moon Fort, where the thud of the boom box shakes the thick hot night air, and where locals and tourists alike eat food cooked outside on wood-fired coal-pots and served on paper plates. The service is unbelievably slow, even by Barbadian standards, and as you sit enveloped in the velvet night, munching your way through dolphin or tuna marinaded in ‘seasoning’, the romantic whoosh of the sea below is drowned out by the furious clack of dominoes and the whoops of joy from leathery old men playing on the fishwives’ slabs next door. Alternatively, we go to the fish market itself — the one near the stunningly graceful Carlton Bay — and buy flying fish from the toothless crones who sit silently filleting them all day long.

Then there are the visits to church. Barbadians are a religious lot and a regular joy is to see women in huge hats and white crinklene heaving their hips into the local Pentecostalist hut, from whence emerge, all night long, the jangle of tambourines and the clap of hands. I often wish I were a Pentecostalist when in Barbados, for the local Catholic Mass is a dull affair by comparison. Our local parish priest, a sixty-something, bronzed, upper-middle-class English Jesuit with strange eyes who seems to have stepped straight out of a Graham Greene novel, is a confirmed liberal and his Mass is not much like the Roman Renaissance display they put on at the Brompton Oratory. It is redeemed, for me, only by the fact that the church looks out over the sea: as one kneels in veneration of the Blessed Sacrament, one can watch, through the open windows behind the altar, jet skiers and motorboats speeding about on the blue water outside.

Indeed, it is the Barbadians themselves who are the main source of the island’s charm. Apart from the beaches, which are both breathtaking and deserted (most tourists sit around the pool, in spite of the fact that the snorkelling is among the best in the world), Barbados is topographically unremarkable. Large parts of it have been uglified by the country’s remorselessly rising prosperity, as the cane fields fall prey to urban sprawl and hypermarkets. But the Barbadians’ charm does not lie, as you might expect, in a constantly upbeat mood, as if life were a constant carnival, even though it is true that they seldom miss an opportunity to jig their hips around: in the words of the Harry Belafonte song, ‘When she wind up she bottom, she go like a rocket.’ Instead, 350 years of British domination have left their mark and the Bajans now have a curious combination of English downbeat fatalism and dourly laconic wit which, superimposed on a distinctly Afro-Caribbean lethargy, can sometimes make them appear cussed or even intimidating to the untrained eye.

For the most part, it is the teasing one notices. Two enormous young women I saw ambling along in the sun last summer, the bulk of their busts equalled only by the roundness of their ‘backs’, were deliciously wreathed in smiles as two likely lads driving past leant out of their truck to shout, ‘We like what we see, girls!’ The same goes for the ferocious ladies at the fruit stall near the Chefette. Many are the hapless tourists who have run the gauntlet in front of them, nervously trying to avoid stopping to buy a mango or an avocado pear. ‘Look me head, darlin!’ they loudly demand. ‘Wa you wan buy from me today?’ When there is no one to shout at, they silently chew on bits of fruit, languidly spitting out the pips and fanning themselves in the midday heat; but their banter is interspersed with wicked throaty chuckles which sound like a shriek and which make their whole bodies shake, and the initially unnerved Englishman, his pink skin tingling from sunburn, comes to realise that their hard sell is, like life itself, mainly a joke.

]]>http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/27478/fish-fries-in-half-moon-fort/feed/0Holy ordershttp://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/27477/holy-orders/
http://www.spectator.co.uk/travel/27477/holy-orders/#commentsSat, 20 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000http://www.spectator.co.uk/?p=27477‘No flash! No flash! Mama mia, four times I tell-a you, ma you do it again!’ The anger of the sacristan of the church of S. Agostino rolled past Caravaggio’s… Read more

]]>‘No flash! No flash! Mama mia, four times I tell-a you, ma you do it again!’ The anger of the sacristan of the church of S. Agostino rolled past Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna dei Pellegrini’ and struck a Japanese with a beatific smile fixed under a digital camera who was clicking away in the direction of Bernini’s altar and the ‘Madonna of St Luke’, igniting explosions of light. At the back of the church, meanwhile, a thirty-something woman knelt silently before Sansovino’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, to whom the Romans pray for the safe delivery of a child.

Defending the holiness of Rome’s historic churches is — and probably always has been — a constant battle. I saw skirmishes in most of the 20 or so that I visited in the long weekend I spent there just after Christmas. I got caught in the crossfire myself, in the Chapel of the Holy Relics in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. I was whispering an explanation of the items on display to my American companions when a man kneeling before the reliquary turned to deliver a far louder ‘Shhhh!’ Moments later, the rebuker was himself rebuked by a priest, for standing so manically close to the glass that protects the objects that are claimed to be pieces of the cross, spines from the crown of thorns, and the finger of Doubting Thomas that he was in danger of setting off the alarm. The atmosphere in the chapel was — well, edgy. There was more nervous expectation than prayerful peace.

I got an insider’s view of the intrusiveness of ecclesiastical tourism when I went to the ten o’clock mass at S. Prassede on the morning of the Epiphany, at which the elevation of the chalice was accompanied not by the ringing of a bell, but by three verses of a tune that is frequently followed by the response, ‘I’m on the train!’ From where I was sitting at the back, I could see a tourist standing before the relic of the pillar of Christ’s scourging, with one hand holding her camera, the other fumbling to silence her diddle-oo-da, diddle-oo-da, diddle-oo-da, dum. By day three of my church-crawl I was beginning to wonder whether I was ever going to find a place of spiritual calm. But on day four I had a pleasant surprise.

St Paul Without the Walls is one of Rome’s four major basilicas, but many visitors to the city don’t get round to visiting it because it is such a long way from the centre. With so much art and antiquity within walking distance, people are reluctant to take a dreary tram ride to find some more. The journey to it used to be rather more impressive: pilgrims walked under a mile-long colonnade of marble and stone. But the walkway was wrecked by the Saracens in the 9th century, and now not a trace of it remains. The basilica that it led to nearly went the same way in 1823, when clumsy workmen started a fire that destroyed the roof and three sides of the building. Most of what one sees today is a rebuild — which is another reason that St Paul’s isn’t on most people’s ‘must-see’ list.

But it should be. H.V. Morton thought St Paul Without the Walls ‘infinitely more impressive than St Peter’s’, and that ‘if one did not know that it was a reconstruction one would, at first glance, accept it as a stupendous survival from the past’. He did, mind, consider the exterior to be ‘tasteless’, which I think is a bit harsh; but in any case it’s what inside that matters, and what is inside is simply astonishing.

The basilica is entered through a quad-rangular portico softened by lawns, low hedges and palm trees, in the centre of which is a statue of the Apostle that stops visitors in their tracks. It is huge. Everyone with a camera stops to photograph it. St Paul holds the sword, one of his artistic identifiers, with the confidence of one who has turned death into victory, and the face behind his beard expresses serenity and strength. Both qualities are found in the building right behind him. You step inside, and again you stop. You have to. You have walked into a space that is so vast that you need to pause to orientate yourself. You have left the outside world behind, and you need time to adjust. There is no clutter; there are no things; there is just space. You find yourself standing at the edge of a rectangular lake of marble, edged by 80 pillars that hold the roof 30 metres above your head. At the far end of the nave is a triumphal arch that at first dares you and then invites you to approach. You step forward, and the building has you in its grip.

At the heart of the building is the burial place of the Apostle, the sole reason for the basilica’s existence. Until only recently, the identification of St Paul’s tomb was referred to as a tradition; now, Vatican archeologists are convinced that it is a matter of historical fact. Last year, a series of excavations exposed a Roman sarcophagus immediately underneath the epigraph ‘Paulo Apostolo Mart’ (Paul, Apostle and Martyr) that is carved at the base of the basilica’s high altar. The coffin has a hole in the top, through which pieces of cloth would have been lowered to touch the saint’s remains and become holy in their turn. Whether or not the body is still there is another matter: the Vatican has not yet given permission for it to be opened.

Either way, the basilica is a place of inescapable holiness. My American friend Mark said that for all its beauty it was not so much a great place to look at as a great place to be. When we stood by the fountain in the ancient cloister garden behind the main church, we lingered not to admire what the guidebook calls ‘a jewel of Cosmati art and the most significant surviving part of the ancient monastery complex’, but because we felt held by its air of timeless calm. When the time came to go, we didn’t leave reluctantly, but contentedly. We hadn’t come looking for peace, but we had found it, and we were happy to be taking a little of it with us when we left.